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Apr

4

WLST Unplugged: Rage Against the For-Profit Provision of Education


Bringing back an oldie but good post. I’ve taken a mental health day, or something, today but was trying to re-connect with what I’d written about David Brennan and White Hat Management before. Enjoy.

Originally posted on 8/14/07:

Brian at Columbuser wasn’t the first to write about the Bill Todd – David Brennan – White Hat Management – pay to play lawsuit going on related to PACs, and Virginia and Ohio. Others include Plunderbund, the BSB link in the previous sentence and Progress Ohio. Pho wrote about similar problems for Brennan in Colorado.

But Brian’s post was the one where I began to comment and is a good springboard for more fully addressing how I feel about this topic. I wrote the following in response to Brian’s assertion that, “Competition and private enterprise have made this country the wealthiest in the world and is the best way of creating a better product at a cheaper price. Why anyone would think that education should be exempt from this I just don’t understand. And please don’t mention education’s importance- that just makes subjecting it to those forces all the more necessary.”

I didn’t listen to him on that last sentence.

Brian, I appreciate your calm down approach, I am smiling, seriously.

But I wrote what I did because, if we were face to face, that’s the level of exasperation with this topic I would be demonstrating. And, just to let you know how serious I find this issue about better products at cheaper prices (AT WHAT OTHER COSTS, I have to add), I actually had already, last night, thought about what I wanted to blog about on this very topic. But I leave it here in the comments and then incorporate it as a post later today, I hope.

Here is where I come from on this. I do not say it to try and persuade others but it is a belief I’ve held as long as I can remember and when people go all family values on us, and THEN also go White Hat, fahgeddaboutit – such people show themselves not to be sincere. Here is why I say this:

Raising children, raising humans, raising responsible people who then populate a world we want to live in costs money. A lot of money. An undeterminable amount of money due to the variety of humans to whom we give birth. And it should cost, we should pay, whatever it takes. Period. And why should the people who provide the means to help humans develop get short shrift so that people can make money off of them, and then those helpers have what kind of work conditions and quality of life? I cannot accept skimping on that.

Yet what do people, even the wealthiest, try to get away with?

Crappy pay to undocumented people to help them in their homes.
Crappy pay to teenagers sometimes too young to be caring for kids.
Crappy pay to teachers in private schools or parochial schools and as little pay as possible to public school teachers.
And a whole panoply of problems I’ll get into in my post.

That is how you treat the people who are helping us raise our kids, our next generation, the people upon whom I will depend for my care as I head to AARPland?

Brian – this isn’t personal or political – about you or Republicans or Democrats.

As a general rule, I have always, always, always paid more than anyone I know for my babysitters. They are caring for my KIDS. And remember, I worked in a children and family mental health agency for eight years. And you know what they did? They tried to take advantage of ME by trying to pay me as little as possible, of course, and yet what was I doing? I was helping place kids who’d blown out of foster care 11 times in a row and were holding up people in barns with pitchforks on a Friday afternoon when I needed to get home to my own family but no other facility would take those kids and I stayed at work, on my Shabbat, and negotiated with county services until the kid with the pitchfork had a place to go (this is a dramatic example of the work I did, but my point is that people who work for kids, on behalf of kids, will be pushed to the limit of what they’ll do for as little pay as the employer can get away with – you call it best products cheapest prices – I call it near extortion under some circumstances – because we are talking about humans not products).

Maybe this issue I have with making sure people who take care of people are well-paid comes from my life-long interest in why – why do people end up the way they do. And I’ve always traced it back to child development. And if we are not willing to invest in child development, then what the hell good is being the “wealthiest in the world”? It’s bullshit, Brian, bullshit, if we’re not taking care of people they way each of us would want to be taken care of.

So, especially when we’re talking about education, teachers, I cannot accept the profit motive as having a place. Not until every single child and every single teacher and every single person involved in the care and keeping of the school kids has and gets what they deserve – not what the market says they should get.

You know why no one likes the school funding amendment? Because no one wants to learn just how much we SHOULD be spending on education.

I love this country and I’m cool with capitalism. But not across the board. And not when it comes to education and raising children.

Now, you know what I found in my inbox after I posted that comment? Literally within three seconds of posting that comment?

I found this article in the Plain Dealer: “Child-care providers to get boost” I don’t usually excerpt so much but it all seems necessary:

[Office of Early Childhood's Nakiaa] Robinson said about 1,000 children, ages 3 to 5, would benefit from the program beginning this month. The cost of the pilot program is $9.4 million for the first two years and will be covered by the county’s general fund and grants. State money will be needed to continue the program after that.

The push for the county program started with Invest in Children, a public-private partnership formed by commissioners eight years ago. The group’s goal is to cover the cost of preschool education for 26,000 county children by 2018. That’s estimated to be close to $100 million a year.

Most of the dollars in the pilot program will go to providers to educate teachers, improve salaries and reduce child-teacher ratios.

Smith said she will use some of the money to hire more teachers and buy equipment, including computers.

“I want this to be an A-1 center equal to the schools in the sub- urbs,” Smith said.

Most participating families, with incomes of up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, will qualify for county subsidies built into the pilot plan.

Ericka Elmore said the subsidies will help the parents – mostly single mothers – who take their children to her Cleveland home for care.

Elmore said that if she is approved, she plans to use the money for materials to update her math and reading programs. That is important to developing basic skills, she said, especially since children tend to stay in her care for two or three years before entering kindergarten.

Here’s more on Invest in Children.

So here’s an example of a public-private experiment. In fact, most of the money will not be going to anything public but rather to individuals who run these programs from “Head Start sites” which most of the time are places of worship (I wish the PD had just said that but it is very controversial and in fact is part of the program I least like – but that’s another post), their homes or child-care centers, which, I assume, are for-profit. Without mandatory education for this age group of kids, you’re not going to see the public schools involved yet.

But Ohio’s senior U.S. Senator, George Voinovich is very much on the record for supporting expenditures of this kind. And Governor Ted Strickland’s support of early childhood education is one of the main reasons I supported him in his race to be governor.

I could launch into a 57 reasons why we should reject for-profit management of education, but I’ll settle for expanding on the risks of not paying enough or caring enough about education, about not making it the top priority and separating it from the notion that its outcome is a product that we should be able to manufacture cheaply (ugh, I can barely even write that!) that I started in the Columbuser commet:

-failure to attract the best people

-failure to retain the best people

-weakening of the pipeline: bachelors and masters programs must keep up with ever-changing needs, they cost money and require that people want to be academics in education

-hiring people who shouldn’t be hired (either because of a lack of training, licensure, failure to perform criminal background checks)

-stressing the teachers who are employed, which in turn stresses the kids and the parents and the system (don’t go thinking this is so esoteric – just call me and I’ll tell you story after story after story, firsthand observations);

-stressing teachers who are parents themselves (who understands what it must be like to staff a school with parents in their prime having children and then needing to meet the needs of their kids? Are we really going to say that only people without school-age kids should be teachers? Then you better be prepared to pay even more for that premium); and not last but last for now:

How do you think all these factors affect the 5-18 year old mind? If you think kids don’t notice how stressed their teachers are, you’ve never talked to a child who attends school.

Let me end with this:

The Ohio Department of Education released report cards today. You can find yours here. Try here later for a nice graphic from the PD (it’s still showing only 05-06 info). And here’s a list from the PD of the schools that rated “Excellent” in NEOhio. (Here’s the Word document that tells you exactly how the schools were measured.)

What does any of that tell us? Ya got me. But I’m sure we’ll see districts that did well that have a lot less money than other districts that did well. And that should be noted. Because ultimately, this should never be about the money. And I have never argued nor will I ever argue that it is about the money. It will cost what it will cost.

For me, it is about the motive. And people who are in education, for-profit, by definition, will not have the outcome of their “industry” – education – as their job number one. Their job number one, as Brian puts it, will be the best “product” for the cheapest cost. That motive for operating, in education, is unacceptable to me as job number one.

Would you accept anything less from the people responsible for educating your child?

NB: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I would like every legislator who has a child in White Hat or other charter schools to describe their experience and put it on public record. If those schools are so good for the kids that they serve, let’s hear about it.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:29 pm April 4th, 2008 in Business, Courts, Crime, Education, Government, Law, Marketing, Mental health, Ohio, Politics, Predictions, Republicans, Social Issues, Voting 

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